


Falling in Mud and Other Tragedies

by Cards_Slash



Series: Other tragedies and disasters [1]
Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, Thor (2011)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, also bad language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-12
Updated: 2012-08-12
Packaged: 2017-11-12 00:40:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/484701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cards_Slash/pseuds/Cards_Slash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loki was sixteen before he found out that he was adopted.  (Hell, Thor was eighteen before he found out that Loki was adopted and that seemed like the kind of thing an older brother should have known all along.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Falling in Mud and Other Tragedies

Loki was sixteen before he found out that he was adopted. (Hell, Thor was eighteen before he found out that Loki was adopted and that seemed like the kind of thing an older brother should have known all along.) Their parents did a bang-up job of the whole fucking thing too because instead of breaking the news to him nice-and-gentle and maybe doing something fantastic like--oh hell, maybe--buying him a car they waited until Loki worked it out himself.

The thing about Loki (and there were a lot of things to remember about Loki) was that he went through mazes and riddles like a hot knife through butter and nothing kept his attention so well as an interesting puzzle. So he took the whole spread of their family photo-albums and broke down their genetics until he'd convinced himself that there was _absolutely_ no genetic possibility that he could be their parent's biological son.

(Loki's amazing realization coincided with Thor's first year at college so excuse him if he hadn't been exactly paid attention to his little brother's progressively more frantic e-mails and texts about his Punnett square findings. Loki had a high school sophomore's understanding of biology and Thor was overwhelmed by freedom and _girls_.)

Thanksgiving was the first holiday he had off and he came back happy-and-healthy, and well-partied and ready to be well-fed. He walked into a war zone.

Loki had always been sensitive because child prodigies that were bored with their lives and far too good at understand the complexities of the universe were often sensitive and troublesome. He'd done everything he could do to complicate Thor's life since they first day he'd come home as a newborn and he'd infuriated him and he'd tested him and God-knew he'd unintentionally tried to kill him a few times with his 'experiments' but he still managed to talk his way into the top bunk of Thor's bed all the way up until he outgrew them.

So sensitive genius realizes he's adopted and confronts wealthy, well-meaning parents preoccupied with appearances and polite manners and--well, it was the cold war and somewhere in the house Thor was going to find some nuclear missiles.

\--

Loki had been any-other-kid with hair just slightly too long when Thor had left in August. He was tall and angular, kind of painfully bony and still growing into his full potential. He'd never been an ugly kid but he'd always been paler in the skin and darker in the hair than Thor. Sometimes, when he was busy taking the toaster apart with his skinny legs spread open and a dozen potentially deadly tools just at arms reach it made him look like a demon. 

When he came back, Loki was in black skinny jeans and a black shirt with random green streaks here-and-there that looked (quite frankly) really fucking stupid to him. His hair was slicked back and his eyes seemed like they'd been colored around by a fat black marker. He was sitting outside on the porch railing with his feet dangling down with a little bottle of dark-shimmering-green fingernail polish next to him. He was bent over, working with all his concentration on spreading the polish on his pinkie finger while holding the others apart so he didn't smudge it and--

"What the hell?" Thor demanded. (He'd some things in college but that shit? It made sense against the image of his little brother dressed like--whatever the hell that was--painting his nails on the back porch.) 

Loki looked over at him, one dismissive look with an arch-up of his eyebrow and then back down to his nails. He shuffled how he was sitting just slightly. 

"Are you going to talk to me?" Thor asked.

Loki finished what he was doing and brought his nails up to blow on them. He put the brush back and spread his fingers all apart to get a good look at all ten of them and the dark-shimmering-green he'd spread on them. After a moment he was satisfied and he screwed the lid on the polish and turned himself around with an easy-fluid motion and stomped his feet against the ground. He was taller-now than he'd been before Thor left and he pulled at his shirt before he cleared his throat and motioned around him. 

"Loki," Thor said.

When he didn't move Loki just stomped around him and found a way to slam a sliding-glass door just shy of hard enough to break it. 

\--

His four-day weekend at home went from happy-and-relaxing to the most uncomfortable three and a half days he'd ever spent anywhere. It was a strange feeling being a stranger in his own home and having to watch himself just-in-case he sounded happy about something. (Because heaven fucking forbid.)

His parent were exactly like they'd always been: quiet and steady, stern and still accepting but absolutely intolerable of misbehaving in public.

Loki washed his face and wore his dress clothes when they went to see the grandparents but he somehow managed to acquire a lip piercing and glared at both of their parents just _daring_ then to say something. As soon as they were home, Loki was shedding the clothes and by the time Thor made it up the stairs to his room Loki was sitting on the windowsill in his room with his feet on his desk and his black-and-green clothes back in place.

\--

"Why didn't you tell him when he was young?" Thor finally asked his Mother. 

She just sighed at him, "he was just so sensitive and--it never seemed like the right time."

Thor took that at face value because the alternative was throwing a temper tantrum about how they fucked up his first weekend home by being the kind of parents that couldn't tell their son that he was adopted but they still loved him anyway. His mother would have asked him how he could be so selfish (because really he was only concerned about his first weekend off being ruined) and then his father would have lectured him _forever_ about _everything_.

"Well, that turned out well didn't it?" he did get out before he left.

\--

When Thor couldn't take it anymore he grabbed Loki around the chest and bodily dragged him out of the house. Loki fought back like a wet-cat but he didn't make a damn noise the whole way down the drive and into Thor's beat-up second-hand-car. He did try to jump out of the car after Thor managed to kick all of his body parts into the passenger seat and Thor caught him around the gut and threw him back in.

"Damn it," he said as Loki twisted and scratched at him, "just get in the damn car."

Loki glared at him, put his _boots_ up on the dash and blared the most nerve-wracking music _ever_. When that didn't immediately make Thor reach over and start punching the annoying brat, Loki rolled his window all the way down and put a _leg_ out. 

But that was fine as long as he stayed in the damn car.

\--

Thirty minutes later and they were in the middle of nowhere. Loki kicked open the door and threw himself out of the car. His hair was too slicked-back to catch in the light wind that blew past them but he still managed to look completely _offended_ to have ended up in an empty field. There was a single tree and otherwise miles of _nothing_ all around them.

For a brief and beautiful spattering of minutes Loki floundered for an appropriate response to being dragged out to _nothing_. After cycling through all his options he settled on raging off to the left intently and Thor let him stomp it out because trying to stop Loki was a damn good way to lose an eye. He just laid back on the hood of the car with his back on the windshield and folded his arms behind his head.

Twenty-maybe-thirty minutes later and he was half asleep when Loki came back. He was _furious_ when he came back, mud on his boots and the knees of his pants. His hands were smeared with it and he threw two handfuls of it at Thor. It caught him on the face and got in his _mouth_. 

"You ass!" Thor shouted. He shoved himself off the car and ran after Loki. 

He had forgotten, of course, that he'd left Loki to explore a field unattended for the past thirty minutes. He'd forgotten that it was Loki and he couldn't do anything but make every situation worse. He'd also forgotten how damn fast the skinny little jerk could run when he was motivated. So he had to run as fast as he could _possibly_ go just to keep up with him and by the time Thor got close enough he could almost grab the flapping ends of Loki's shirt, Loki made a sharp left and Thor couldn't get stopped in time to follow and fell _face first_ into a _huge_ puddle of mud.

Thor had every _intention_ of killing Loki as soon as he managed to get himself out of the shit but by the time he got up to his feet (with mud just _dripping_ off him, and cleaned out his ears enough to hear and cleared his eyes enough to see: there was Loki doubled over laughing so hard his face was almost purple.

"Your face!" Loki shouted. He was _shaking_ from how hard he was laughing and hitching high-pained breaths between every break of laughter. 

Thor shook his head and felt the smile stretching across his face and how the mud gathered and pulled. He dug himself out of the mud (because Loki was _rolling on the ground_ and useless to him) and back onto the more solid ground. He wiped at the thickest tracks of mud and threw them to the side while Loki clutched his ribs and stared up at him from the ground. "You're such a brat," Thor said. (He'd always said it to him.)

Loki looked almost normal with high-spots of red on his cheeks and that wicked-grin on his face. He pushed an elbow against the ground and squinted at the sun behind Thor. "You didn't think that was going to change, did you?"

"No," Thor said. Then he grabbed him by the elbow and hauled him up. Loki was still light-as-a-feather and Thor still spent every morning working out so it was no-contest. He wrapped both arms around Loki's body and crushed him in close against his chest, smeared his face on him so the mud and drying dirt stuck to him and his prissy-pissy teenager angst. Thor let him got when Loki dug in with his elbows and tried to knee him in the balls and laughed when Loki stumbled back and looked horrified at the mud on his clothes. 

For a second it could have gone either way: shrieking complaints or mutual good-humor. Thor never held his breath with Loki because a person could suffocate doing that but he did wait to start laughing until he saw the smile tugging at the edge of his brother's lips.

"You ass!" Loki shouted at him, but he was laughing again.

\--

Back at the car they found an old T-shirt in his trunk to wipe off their faces and shed their shirts and tossed them in the trunk. Loki sat on the roof of the car with his boots leaving mud-prints on the windshield while Thor leaned back against it with his arms behind his head. They shared the only half-empty flat two liter of soda they could find in his car and a few protein bars he had squirreled away from between-class snacks.

"These taste like feet," Loki told him.

"You get used to it," Thor said back.

Slowly-but-surely Loki worked down to sitting next to him, all long and skinny and looking off into the middle distance with blank intensity. Thor watched him but kept his mouth shut and Loki worked his way around to saying what he needed to say. "You're a good brother," Loki said finally, "I mean--you didn't have to be and you _are_."

"God knows you don't make it easy," Thor said. He looked sideways-at-Loki and caught the flinch of a smile that tried to make it and died. "You'll always have me, Loki."

His answer was all silence and Loki's stale gaze staring off into the middle distance. 

\--

They had to drive home in pants that were dried-mud-stiff and smelled like the worst kind of stagnant water and wild animal shit. They kept the windows down and Loki found a station that played music that was acceptable to both of them before the music was turned down and then off while Loki explained the world to him.

Thor listened to him talk because it was damn-near hypnotic and he grunted and agreed and protested at the appropriate intervals. They drove up to their parents house after dark and just before curfew and Thor killed the engine and leaned back in the seat. 

His parents were up in their big-grand-house worrying about their sons and fretting over what could-be-should-be done and Thor heaved a sigh. "You're going to milk this forever aren't you?"

"I'm not the liar," Loki said. He even managed to look innocent and defensive when Thor glared at him for that. (They forever argued about the difference between lying, misleading and manipulation.) "Don't look at me like that, you got everything you ever wanted from them."

"Fair enough," Thor said. Then he nodded at the ring stuck in the side of Loki's lip. "Why the lip thing?"

Loki ran his finger across it and bit back a smile. He looked haughty-and-spoiled when he said, "I do what I want, Thor." Then he was getting back out of the car and dragging half the impossible stink with him.


End file.
